Insta-Machine: Tremendous blowback on my NBA No-Defense team

Short summary: Sacramento’s Kevin Martin is my 2008-09 NBA No-Defense Player of the Year, joined by Antawn Jamison, Kevin Durant, Al Thornton, Peja Stojakovic and many others.

Again: Hearty congratulations, guys!

As is now a great annual tradition, Friday’s item generated plenty of commenter-heat and, I hope and presume, will continue to do so as the various dis-honors float through the internet to, say, Washington and Memphis and Indianapolis.

Yes, this is the best and worst thing I do on this site, because it’s fairly unique (so far nobody else that I know does this, maybe because it’s so stupid, maybe not), because it’s upsetting for many fans to ever see their stars singled out and because, well, I like to generate consternation among the widest group of fans possible.

Consternation that leads to interesting conversation and trying to figure out why teams win or lose… that’s a blogging bulls-eye as far as I’m concerned. The anger directed at me is just a bonus by-product.

So let’s throw up a quick edition of the Answering Machine, my first in 8 months. Oops, that’s way too long. My bad. (ARRGH. This is why I don’t do many Machines–this thing got so screwed up in the coding that it took me more than an hour to post without it screwing up my entire page and I still had to kill out a first try and re-do.) Onward…

——My response to Leo’s response: Ankle injury. Excuse. I know. Martin still played 51 games. And he played 61 games in 2007-08 (groin problems) and was also terrible on defense in the exact same statistical ways–the Kings were 6 points worse per 100 possessions on defense, had a 3.8% worse defensive EFG when he was on the floor vs. when he was off.

(EFG% counts made three-pointers as 1.5 of a made two. From now on, I’ll just type FG% with the understanding that it’s EFG.)

And Martin played 80 games in 2006-07, and also was terrible on defense. Also in the exact same statistical ways–the Kings were 5.5 points worse on defense per 100 possessions and had a 4.8% worse defensive FG when he was on the floor.

Not a coincidence, presumably.

At some point, you have to stop making excuses for terrible individual defense which leads to terrible, terrible, terrible team defense which leads to 50-loss seasons and maybe 60-loss seasons.

When a perimeter player gets lit up game after game and year after year, and the team looks around and tries to figure out why it’s so terrible on defense… You have to blame somebody, preferably the worst-somebody on defense.

At some point, it’s not about injuries, it’s about being a poor defensive player.

I’m not saying Martin’s a titanically awful overall player–he’s a great scorer and he’s still young. But there are many reasons why Sacramento is an awful defensive team and has been for a few seasons, and Martin is one of them. A big one.

Losing is always the end answer. You don’t want to lose, then it’s better not to pretend your fun offensive player is any good on defense, if he isn’t.

* J the Fan wrote: No more plus minus garbage

* Smills91 wrote: This article is pure garbage. Using team stats to dictate individual play? Are you serious.

——My response to their responses: You don’t like the plus/minus. You hate the plus/minus. It’s a horrible, horrible stat, possibly the worst ever. Except I didn’t just decide to start using it out of goofs and giggles.

I was doing my own (bad) personal plus/minus for years, just as a way to pay closer attention to what really matters in the game–Does the team play better or worse when a player is on the floor?

I know, it’s mean to actually hold individual players accountable. I know it’s silly to try to quantify stuff that directly leads to getting a lead or falling behind–crazy stuff that wins or loses games.

But oh well. I keep using the plus/minus, and so do George Karl and Don Nelson (believe me, we both hate it that we both like the stat) and many other coaches and executives.

I’ll say it again: There are no dependable individual stats for defensive measurement. Plus/minus and the comparative team points-per-100-possessions and defensive FG% are useful devices, if you care about defense.

Interestingly, I keep running little tests with the plus/minus and team comparable defensive stats, and strange things keep happening. I’ll get to a couple of the ones I always go by in a bit, after I get jostled some more…
* Truth wrote: Any no-defense team that doesn’t have Monta Ellis on the first team is bogus. He is worse than Martin.
—–My response to Truth: Ellis is right there with Martin in defenseless, as any eyeball test would tell you, but I gave Ellis a pass this year for two reasons. Ellis played in only 25 games this season, and I decided any player who didn’t play in at least 40 games games was not eligible for the No-Defense Team.

Also, Ellis’ defensive stats aren’t horrendous compared with his teammates (2.1 points worse on defense per 100 possessions), plus he had 39 steals in the 25 games. I put Ellis on the NDT last year as an eye-ball qualifier, even without the extra stat-padding, but this year I couldn’t do it.

Ellis vs. Martin is an individual match-up, however, that is No-Defense Greatness encapsulated.

* dth wrote: Do you understand plus-minus at all? it’s clear the answer is no. raw plus/minus is virtually useless…it makes no effort to sort out teammate effects.so, if i’m playing with a team of lebron, howard, duncan, wade (i’m running the point, ha), suddenly i look great even though i’m a terrible basketball player. furthermore, an otherwise-strong player can look worse if he’s got a good backup (someone like nic batum might look weaker by this measurement than otherwise).

——-My response to dth’s response: You make good points, but no, I think you misinterpret my cluelessness. I will continue to repeat: The plus/minus stat is RELATIVE to the rest of the team. But not virtually useless, in my not-at-all humble opinion.

Let’s glance at Cleveland’s season plus/minus figures for the main guys:

LeBron +855.

Mo Williams +608.

Delonte West +573.

Ilgauskas +463.

Wallace +411.

Gibson +223.

Sure the rest of those guys have big plus numbers in large part due to grace of playing with LeBron. But he’s the one with the No. 1 plus/minus in the league. The rest of the Cavs’ top guns have descending totals. That tells you something–and the order and degree of the descent tells you something, too.

Not everything. But something. And when and if one of those guys moves to another team and his numbers plummet, I’ll take note of that–because it’s RE-LA-TIVE. Have I said that?

One more plus/minus stat run, this time from the Lakers playoffs so far:

Odom +91.

Bryant +81.

Gasol +75.

Ariza +53.

Fisher +31.

S Brown +27.

Farmar +10.

Walton +9.

Vujacic +6.

Bynum -4.

Powell -14.

As a team, the Lakers are +65 (before Game 4 tip-off today in Houston). Relatively speaking, those are interesting and dare I say significant numbers.

In the Laker stats, according to dth’s theorem of frauds, I’m trying to figure out which fraud player is getting a free ride and looking tremendous just because he plays with Kobe. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Oh, I’m just being useless now. To repeat a word.
* MORE dth: basically, your entire post is pretty much useless-the only real way to evaluate defense is to watch it yourself. so i can tell you that, for instance, antawn jamison is an average defender and caron butler (who you say you could’ve put on there) is an excellent one; they’re trapped on a team with some awful defensive players though, and that makes them look terrible.

——My other response to dth’s response: Aha! If the main reason you’re fired up about this is because you think Jamison is an “average” defensive player and you’re mad I don’t think he’s close to average… Well, you are a privileged person to watch Wizards games consistently and still believe in the mightiness of Jamison’s lateral footspeed.

I watch 5 or 6 Wizards games every year and I covered Antawn quite a bit when he was a Warriors player, back when he tried to play defense and still couldn’t and admitted he wasn’t very good at it.

And I don’t think even Antawn would truthfully consider himself anything but below-average on defense now that he’s 33 and is that much slower. He’s a bad defender–that’s what you call guys who can’t stop anybody from getting to the rim and don’t play help defense.

There has to be a reason teams like Washington can’t play defense and it’s not their scrub players, who, I guess, are far easier for fans to blame. It’s the guys who get the most minutes who should be singled out, almost every time.

And if you’re a good defensive player getting good minutes trapped on a bad team, the comparable defensive stats will indicate that.

The comparable stats don’t suggest anything of the sort for Jamison. Washington was a worse defensive team when Jamison played than when he didn’t, WAY worse as a defensive team when Butler played than when he didn’t.

Ad the Wizards were 5 to 6 points much BETTER as defensive team per 100 possessions when Nick Young or Andray Blatche were on the floor than when they were off.

I guess it was all DeShawn Stevenson’s fault, eh? (Terrible defender, but he only played 23% of the team’s minutes. Jamison played 79%, Butler played 66%.) )

The peripheral defensive stats show up the right way for a guy like the Cllippers’ Marcus Camby: The Clippers gave up 117.1 points per 100 poss when he was off the floor, 108.6 per 100 poss when he was playing; opponents shot 4.1% worse when Camby was playing than when he wasn’t.

Camby is a good defensive player who was stuck on a bad defensive team, and the stats showed it.

* Numbers Guy wrote (on the evils of the plus/minus): (1) It compares a player TO HIS REPLACEMENT, not to the league. The better a player’s replacement, the worse the +/- …even though the player himself isn’t any different.

(2) It commingles a player within the overall ability of the team around him, so a lousy player playing with 4 great players looks way better than he is – and vice versa.Unfortunately TK has never taken the time to examine what +/- actually tells us, and so he continuously uses it to try to tell us things (esp comparative player ability, between teams and positions) that it just can’t do accurately. You can claim it tells us those things, but when you do so you’re either an idiot who doesn’t know better, or a liar who does.

——-My response to Numbers Guy’s response: OK, I’m sure my buddy Numbers Guy has checked and re-checked all of this. He knows, by mathematical fact, that the plus/minus stat is not only useless, it’s erroneous. He knows. He truly knows.

Or maybe he doesn’t really.

I understand: Some people don’t like it when I single out players, for good or bad but mostly they get queasy when it’s for bad. It makes them uncomfortable. They love their individual players. They love their familiar stats–points, rebounds, assists.

Maybe not Numbers Guy specifically, I don’t mean to pick on the NG, but he got me thinking… Some people want to hear about the great team effort despite the 22-point loss! Everybody’s great! Nobody’s getting singled out!

Except if you want to figure out why bad teams are bad, you have to try to single out players. Unless you just want to keep being bad and blame the minor players because it’s easier that way.

You’re right, NG, plus/minus and the other stats I use are relative stats. That is, in fact, how I use them, or at least how I try, perhaps not always well.

I have not, to my memory, argued that LeBron James, at +855 for the season, is 10 times better than Joakim Noah, who was at +86. (Though I probably could.)

It doesn’t work like that. It’s a measurement vs. the team’s overall play–how does, say, Troy Murphy’s time on the floor help or hurt the team vs. the time he is not out there?

I realize that if he has a good replacement, his numbers won’t look as good–but if the team consistently plays better with his replacement than it does with Ol’ Murph… umm… maybe Ol’ Murph isn’t that good?

The plus/minus is one piece of the puzzle, but it’s a huge one because it is one of the few stats available that tracks any kind of defensive measurement. Pretty much everything else is offense.

I happen to believe the game is at least 50% defense and it’s ridiculous to value players based almost solely on their points-rebounds-assists-dunks (Nate Robinson for 2010 MVP!), though some of you surely disagree.

I can live with that. This is why I do the No-Defense Team–to irritate and debate and make sure that if I’m wrong I get yelled at and if I’m right I really get yelled at and to push the idea that Kevin Durant’s 25.3 points/6.5 rebounds perhaps does not tell the entire story of the Thunder.

Which is a team that happens to play lousy defense. But such a mystery as to why!

Here are the numbers that partly convinced me that the plus/minus (and the other stats I use in this annual survey–the points-per-100-possessions differential and the EFG% differential) are worthy.

You don’t have to like it. But again, this is a big reason why I do.

—The 2006-2007 Sacramento Kings were a great team to study for one huge reason: Ron Artest was on the team, but he was not joined by many other clear-cut defensive studs.

I think I can safely mark Artest down as a great defensive player, practically a “control case” for the plus/minus stat. He has to come up as a good defensive player in any true defensive measurement and if he does–and he does in a way that separates him from lesser defensive players–then that has the markings of an accurate defensive stat.

Artest = good defensive player, no matter who surrounds him. It’s relative, I realize, but he’s GOOD COMPARED TO HIS TEAMMATES.

And he had interesting teammates, too:

-Mike Bibby (at that point in his career he was a presumed neutral defender);

-Kevin Martin (I was then wondering if he might be an awful defender);

-John Salmons (a presumed neutral-to-poor defender, played some point behind Bibby and also both wing spots–so he’d be a partial replacement for both Artest and Bibby, which is very important to NG’s thesis);

-Francisco Garcia (a presumed good defender who played some point, some wing, also a partial replacement for both Artest and Bibby and a decent duplicate of Salmons in some ways, for comparative purposes).

* Artest…….. +39 plus/minus….. Kings gave up 1.5 points LESS when he played per 100 poss.

* Martin……. -162 plus/minus…. Kings gave up 5.5 points MORE when he played per 100 poss.

* Bibby……. -36 plus/minus….. Kings gave up .1 points MORE when he played per 100 poss.

* Salmons…. -186 plus/minus….. Kings gave up 2.8 points MORE when he played per 100 poss.

* Garcia….. -30 plus/minus…. Kings gave up 3.1 points LESS when he played per 100 poss

Hmm.

If we arbitrarily say that Garcia was Martin’s back-up, how come he’s -30 and Martin is a -162, which seems to nicely match Garcia’s GOOD defensive stats and Martin’s BAD defensive stats? All hogwash?

Same with Artest/Salmons… the plus/minus stats are reasonable and go hand-in-hand with the defensive stats I’ve pulled out.

I don’t think it’s hogwash. I think the test case works perfectly. On to another one, even more familiar to Warriors fans, and definitely my favorite one, because it involves SWITCHING TWO PLAYERS IN FOR TWO NEW PLAYERS.

That year, the Warriors and Indiana made that huge trade not exactly at mid-season, but close enough–about three games short of halfway through.

Jackson and Harrington didn’t precisely replace Dunleavy and Murphy’s on the Warriors’ roster, but it’s also close enough for stat perusal.

So if my theories are correct, the Dunleavy/Murphy stats from their Warriors’ half of the season (when the Warriors stunk) should be dwarfed by the Jackson/Harrington stats (when the Warriors roared to life).

I know, there’s Jason Richardson’s injury, missed time and comeback as an additional factor, but he played enough games with both tandems for it to balance out, relatively.

The stat lines…

* JACKSON played 32% of the Warriors’ minutes, had a +136 plus/minus for his Warriors time, and had a +4.6 defensive points differential (Warriors gave up 4.6 points LESS when he was on the court).

* HARRINGTON played 34% of the Warriors’ minutes, had a +15 plus/minus, and had a +1 defensive points differential.

* DUNLEAVY played in 26% of the Warriors’ minutes, had a -15 plus/minus for his Warriors time, and had a -1.7 defensive points differential (Warriors gave up 1.7 MORE points when he was out there than when he was off the floor).

* MURPHY played in 16% of the Warriors’ minutes, had a -83 plus/minus, and had a -3.5 defensive points differential.

That seems to work just fine. Jackson for Dunleavy, Harrington for Murphy–how is that a terrible misjudgement of the Warriors’ season?

The team got better because they were better at the forward spots and I know how people hate it when I spotlight on particular players, but gee, Jackson was way better than Dunleavy defensively (among other facets) and therefore the team was WAY better when he was on the floor.

Same with Harrington for Murphy. I’m sorry, but that’s not incorrect and the plus/minus and defensive comparables are right down the line on this one.

I’m using the stats. I’ll still get a lot of people mad. Jamison fans. Anti-me folks. Kevin Martin’s entourage. It’s endless chatter/bloggery.

And I’ll keep doing the No-Defense Team, because you just can’t buy angry comments like these. Keep ’em coming.

Tim Kawakami

Post navigation

I love how the Warriors continue to get owned by all media, everywhere.

Biedrins and Randolph were offered for Bosh. The Warriors were rejected. Then Randolph played. Biedrins had his minutes screwed around with all year, healthy or otherwise.

It’s never getting better. They’re both toaly on the block for some crappy one year rental.

Where’s Bosh on your no-defense list?
Amare?

problem

The problem is that +/- doesn’t control for pace of the game. Shaq will slow the game down on offense and barbosa will speed it up- so this changes the other team’s number of opportunities at the other end. Clearly ellis speeds up the game for the W’s (really the only way they can run a fast break) and the other team should score more when he is on the court even if he was a good defender (he isn’t). It would be better if the plus minus stat controlled for number of possessions, but that still would not be perfect.

This is a pet peeve of mine – but not quite on the level of the false assumption that the team giving up the least/most points per game is the best/worst defensive team. Just stupid, but this is repeated many times a week in the press. Most journalists would say that a team that lost 100-80 played better defense than a team that won 140-130. Again, no regard for pace of the game.

SSigg

Problem,

TK used “per 100 possessions” for his defensive points differential.

Kommon Senze

+/- is erroneously attributed to individuals when, in reality, it’s more of a team stat or rotational stat. It can be useful, but it has to be considered contextually. For example, Kevin Martin has a horrible +/-, but he also happened to play of the 5-man units with the best +/- ratios. If you look more carefully at the 3-man, 4-man, and 5-man +/- stats, you’ll start to see that he’s not the common denominator in all of the porous defense for the Kings. Spencer Hawes was, in reality, a huge contributor to the awful defensive units for the Kings. His individual Roland rating, which looks at both his individual matchup numbers and the team +/- rating shows how when he was on the floor, the Kings were far less effective in scoring while being just as bad on defense.

That doesn’t mean Martin wasn’t a bad defender. He was; definitely one of the less effective 2-guard defenders in the league. But the league’s worst? Tim.. you don’t watch enough basketball if you honestly think he was the most egregious non-defender in the league. To be honest, Ray Allen is a worse defender, but he’s bolstered by having a tremendous defensive team around him to cover for his deficiencies. Anyone who watches the game knows that Ray Allen is an embarassment on defense. One of the nicest guys around. A great scorer, and an invaluable teammate. But if he were in Martin’s shoes in Sacramento, he’d look just as bad.

Point being, if anyone is dong an “all-non-defensive team” using +/- as the arbiter without understanding the context, they’re missing the point. As much as it might appear to be a ‘thoughtful’ analysis because it involves stats, it’s really quite lazy. Sorry, Tim, but you continue to leave me unimpressed with your basketball acumen.

For example, Kevin Martin has a horrible +/-, but he also happened to play of the 5-man units with the best +/- ratios. If you look more carefully at the 3-man, 4-man, and 5-man +/- stats, you’ll start to see that he’s not the common denominator in all of the porous defense for the Kings. Spencer Hawes was, in reality, a huge contributor to the awful defensive units for the Kings. His individual Roland rating, which looks at both his individual matchup numbers and the team +/- rating shows how when he was on the floor, the Kings were far less effective in scoring while being just as bad on defense.

fumblin’ frank

Joe Smith is gonna be wearing a Championship ring in a few weeks…from the outhouse in the beginning of his career, to the penthouse at the end of his career…

dth

Rarely have I enjoyed my points being misinterpreted more than this. I’m a Bulls fan; I don’t give a shit about Jamison or Butler, besides what I care about the truth. At any rate, your defense is pretty laughable for reasons other commenters have gotten at, so I just won’t bother.

Your error is to assume guys like me or NumbersGuy are, in fact, not statistically minded. This is not the case. I cited 82games.com in my original post, which is more than enough to establish that a) I really care about statistics; b) I’m not merely a Triple Crown, box score basketball person.

My point is not that a player is a fraud or isn’t a fraud, but that raw plus/minus is a near-useless stat, as nearly every member of the statistically-minded basketball community will tell you…Now, it may or may not be indicative relatively speaking, but your use of plus/minus is insufficiently relative: perhaps backups or alternative lineups perform better because they have better matchups, not because they are better defensively in a general sense; even more broadly, perhaps a player could be deployed effectively defensively in a different scheme, which seems to be the implication of your column. Given that the point of statistical analysis is to figure out performance and potential performance, this would seem to be rather damning to the use of plus/minus as a crutch: it will not support the weight that you’re putting on it; it collapses.

Kommon Senze

It’s simple, Kudos. +/- is not an individual stat, and any analysis of it based on the individual +/- is missing a lot in the analysis of how a player actually performs defensively. If a team is less efficient offensively when certain players play, the +/- will skew against those units. While Martin was clearly a poor defensive player, was his bad +/- a product of his inability to defend, or his team’s overall inability to defend?

Ray Allen had a +520 this year, better than Rondo, better than Garnett, better than Pierce. Does anyone think he’s a better defender than each of his teammates? If you’ve watched Ray Allen play, you’ll see he’s a horrible defender. He doesn’t close out, he can’t stay in front of players, and his basic defensive move is the arm flail, often after the ball is already on its way towards the basket. He’s a very proficient shooter, however, and his +/- is primarily bolstered by what he brings on the offensive end, not on the defensive end. He’s helped by the fact that his team (and the units he plays on) are very proficient defensively. Thus, not only is the +/- not an individual stat, it’s not even a defensive stat.

Want further proof?

Pau Gasol has a better +/- than Dwight Howard; would you ever consider Gasol for the All-Defensive team? In fact, Dwight’s teammate, Rashard Lewis (not exactly known as a stalwart defender) has a higher +/- than the 2008-09 DPOY. The fact that Tim’s statistical analysis is almost entirely based on this stat should say something about how much time he put into vetting out the relevancy of the stat.

Kevin Martin is a bad defender. I’m not disputing that. He also happens to play on one of the worst defensive teams in the league, so perhaps Tim is justified in giving him the award on that basis. But using +/- as the basis is flawed no matter how you slice it. If you’re going to float out an all non-defensive team, it better be based on actual analysis of the defensive play and not on an stat that isn’t properly contextualized and is entirely mis-analyzed.

Numbers Guy

TK, you gave a long reply to the negative feedback to your column, and you get props this once for addressing them rather than airily acting again like they were only due to some sort of anti-TK cabal.

DTH used the same type of answers I would offer as well. In general, anyone in the statistical community would either cringe or laugh at the way you’ve applied +/- here to evaluations it cannot give you. Where you’ve erred the most in this discussion is when you’ve used your +/- to compare players on one team with players on another. Within a solitary team, especially in evaluating combinations of players, +/- can be a great tool. But using it to compare individuals playing on different teams with different teammates and various levels of backups (as you have done here) offers relative crap for results.

And when your defense is that a pure +/- number is about all you have to work with, come on, that’s weak. You are a reporter. Doubtless there are thousands of hoop stat guys on the net, any number of whom might be glad to guide you to better evaluators. Even +/- itself is adjusted in many ways by various numbers guys to help tell a more accurate story. If you don’t take the time to get a bit of help to figure out how to evaluate properly, given your resources, that one is on you.

(While we’re on the topic, I should add that some of the conclusions I’ve seen you draw in your game threads on a player’s +/- in this game or that have severely misconstrued the relative quantity and meaning of the stat within a game itself. That’s merely a caution to you that you need to go getter a better BASIC understanding of the value of +/- numbers when you write. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Do I have an agenda? Only one, and it’s not against you personally. I do have a bias against lazy reporting and misused stats. So my hope is to see you eventually stop taking the lazy way out and start using stats to tell the story that they truly tell. Reporting is more enjoyable when the reporter is letting the chips fall where they may, and stats are not facts when used incorrectly.

Kommon Senze

Note: I should add that I have read the debate between numbers guy and timmy as well as dth and timmy. Sorry, but the selective examples provided by Kawakami are just that; selective.

When he can explain why Ray Allen has a better +/- to Rondo, or Rashard Lewis has a better +/- to Howard without dismissing it with the “lift” explanation (of course they get lifted by their teammate, but why are they lifted higher if they are inferior defenders?), then I’ll shut up.

It doesn’t take long to search through the NBA +/- stats to see this pattern play itself out over and over again. Look at the +/- by unit; consider the fact that 1st units and 2nd units often play against different players, as well. It’s not and never should be the stat that any ‘non-defensive’ team is based.

I also realize Timmy uses eFG as a barometer. Again, this can be a misleading statistic, because it’s still a team stat, not an individual stat. To prove that..

Who is a better defender? Tim Duncan, or Matthew Bonner? If you go by Tim’s analysis, Bonner is.

Bonner eFG while he’s on (48.2%) vs. off (49.1%)
Duncan eFG while he’s on (49.1%) vs. off (48.0%)

Bonner +/- = 275
Duncan +/- = 247

Bonner played 48% of his team minutes
Duncan played 62% of his team minutes

……..

I should add that Kawakami does identify a lot of pretty mediocre to bad defenders, but I think there are quite a few players (including Jamal Crawford) who are worse individual defenders than some of those listed. Jason Kapono, who is the living example of stone feet, should never be left off such a list on principle, even if he does play less minutes than most of those on the team, because his lack of minutes are largely due to the fact that, despite being lights out as a shooter, he’s such a liability on the court defensively that the Raptors simply couldn’t afford to put him on the floor.

KudostoTK

KS, thanks for your clear explanation of your view on this matter.

Common Sense

Just gotta add that the ersatz “Kommon Senze” is not me. Mr. Originality showed up later. Proof? I’m not a windbag.

I am constantly amused at how TK gets a rise from everyone over this stuff. Keep it up TK!

Nuck Chorris

Numbers Guy,

“Letting the chips fall where they may”

Yes, because sheepishly regurgitating press releases and prepared statements for each franchise (and they all have one agenda) is exactly what I want from a reporter.

It’s not like there are any real winners in Bay Area sports that deserve a positive reflection of the Media (Sharks maybe and Giants are doin’ OK).

Lol, GTFO

If anything letting the chips fall where they may is one of the primary reason for the mediocrity of sports teams in the Bay Area. Each has gotten a free pass from the most widely circulated paper, the Chronicle. The one writer I would say really doesn’t live up to expectations is Janny Hu, but the problem is more deeply rooted in the editorial staff or whomever is in charge of content control. There hasn’t been a negative piece about Cohan and the Warriors since the 2002. The Hu-ster is more than happy to take perks or stay completely silent at the team’s behest. It’s almost embarrassing to be a Chronicle subscriber since I am primarily interested in the Warriors.

I say force transparency in the Bay and turn these crap a$$ teams around.